Death, Thou Shalt Die



Propers:
All Saints (Hallowmas), A.D. 2018 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

What a thing it is to stand at the foot of a grave and declare victory.

To lower into the earth the remains of what was, for a moment, human: a loved one, a relative, a parent or, God forbid, a child. And there to say that this meant something, this little life, this spark amidst the darkness, who once laughed and wept and learned and loved; whose mind contained vast worlds unknown, a universe of thoughts and hopes and dreams and fears. And is now but ashes and bones and dust.

A heartbeat. A hair’s breadth. And it’s all over. Or so it would seem.

I’ve lost count of how many people I’ve buried, how many I’ve watched die. But never once has it led me to despair. To mourn, certainly. To grieve, for years. But I’ve never believed, no matter how I might try, that death is simply the end. Maybe it’s because I grew up around death. My grandparents’ property abutted a lovely, massive old cemetery, the sort you find in Pennsylvania that goes back to the 1700s, the 1600s. That’s a long time for Americans.

And that place was never scary to me. It was a place of peace, a place of rest, a place of enlightenment. That field, I felt, with its weathered headstones, was a world between worlds, a time between times. A passageway, if you will, from the here and now to the great unknown beyond. There lay all my forebears whose questions now are answered. Someday I too would lay with them. Someday I too would know what they know, the dead know. I could never quite bring myself to believe that those who die are simply gone. I still can’t to this day. It’s just not in me.

And in this conviction, at least, I stand in good company. Every human society, every philosophy, every religion, has known that there are worlds beyond this one, destinies that await each of us beyond our pilgrimage on earth. We have always believed in spirits and souls, gods and monsters, afterlives and just rewards. Science hasn’t changed that, hasn’t changed who we are. We all know there’s more to life than merely what we can measure, touch, and see. We all know that there’s so much more to explore than this one broken, fallen world.

Which is why the Hallowmas is so important, the celebration of All the Saints. Today we remember all those who have gone before us, all those who died in Christ to rise immortal in His likeness. The dead are not defeated. They are not even truly dead.

For them this life, this world, was but an embryo, a half-formed existence, wracked by pangs of labor, which have given way now to new birth. And the reality they now know, the goodness and truth and beauty they experience directly, unfettered by mortal flesh, is so far beyond our comprehension and communication that it would be like lecturing a child in the womb on high-level theoretical physics.

At the heart of all human experience lies the conviction that the world, as it is, is not as it ought to be; that everything we think or say or do is wrong somehow, just a little off the mark; and that the realest things in our world—love, beauty, truth, morality—are but the shadows of a greater reality we cannot quite manage to see. We can only glimpse it in poetry, in art, in myths and dreams, in selfless acts of kindness and in the sheer magnitude of wonders found within the natural world around us, if only we can manage to sit still long enough to pay attention. But beyond these glimpses, flashes of truth in a shattered mirror, it’s all wrong somehow, all fallen.

And even time itself has been affected, so that we do not experience time as we ought, as it was meant to be, but rather as the grinding away of relentless aeons, tick by tick, grain by grain, measuring our time by metronomes and teaspoons. Little wonder, then, that death seems so unnatural, for time itself is out of joint, winding down inexorably into entropy and chaos, making a mockery of meaning and purpose and value. And all this mess—is exactly why Christ had to come.

Sin is separation from God, and our world indeed was separate, sabotaged from the beginning by powers far beyond our mortal ken. And so God Himself—the Creator, the Source and Font of All Being—entered into His Creation as one of us, one of the lost and wayward children of Adam and of Eve. He comes to our world as Victor and King, the realest thing in this and all other realities, though we perceive Him rather as marginal, poor, unimportant. And everywhere Christ goes, He makes things real: He heals the sick and feeds the hungry, rebukes the sinner, casts out the demon, instructs the ignorant, consoles the grieving, forgives the unforgiveable, and brings the dead to life.

And then He does the darnedest thing of all: He dies. He takes the Cross, the lash, the nails, the spear. He takes all the grisliest horrors our broken brains can devise and He takes them all upon Himself. He enters into our brokenness, enters into our wounds. Enters into that bottomless chasm torn through Creation by sin, and fills it up to bursting with the life and breath and blood of God—and thereby changes everything we thought we knew, of death, and time, and love.

If All Saints had a slogan, a catch phrase or a theme, it could be none other than Christus Victor: Christ the Victor, Christ Victorious! For He has come into our world to grapple with our death. Not to ignore it or step around it but to embrace it, to conquer it, to overcome by going through. And so now death has been defeated! He has broken the back of the grave, so that we may now face death—not as a terror, not as a master, not as some monster which must be appeased—but rather as a servant, a slave, a prisoner of war.

Our Lord has conquered death and hell! So when we die at last in Him, we rise in Him as well.

We tend to think of reality as that which we can see and touch, while we view things spiritual as wispy, ephemeral, puffs of mere smoke drifting amidst the solid things of life. But the Bible insists that we have it all upside-down. It’s this world as we know it which is ephemeral and passing, a vapor upon the breeze; while spiritual realities are those which stand adamant, immune to death, decay, and time, immortal in the heavens. The Spirit is life. The Spirit does not die.

When Christ breathes into us His Spirit, He makes us real, makes us solid, makes us Him. Thus does the perishable put on the imperishable, the mortal put on immortality. Thus fortified—resurrected!—we may ascend the hill of the Lord to stand in His holy place. We may shine forth like sparks through the stubble, to rule over nations and peoples. And we as God’s saints are but the firstfruits of His harvest!

For Christ did not come to save some people, to save one little corner of this fallen, wayward world, but to save everyone: all peoples, all places, all times, and all of Creation! This suffering now is but the birth-pangs until the harvest comes in full. For the first heaven and the first earth are even now passing away, and the sea of chaos at length shall be no more. Both shall be reborn as a new heaven and a new earth—one and the same this time—in which God shall no longer be separated from His children but instead shall dwell amongst them in the City beyond all time.

And God Himself will be with them. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away. And the one who was seated on the throne said, “Behold! I make all things new! … It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life. Those who conquer will inherit these things, and I will be their God and they will be my children.”

Death is not your end, dear Christian. It is only the beginning.

Remember this, when the world seems naught but frustration, pain and despair. Remember this, when the weight of life proves more than we think we can bear. The things that plague us, in and out, shall one day pass away. And you will rise from out of death to your first new endless day.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Comments